The comments on that article (and a few in here), are lamenting the churn and loss of addresses due to the whims of the market. People holding onto email addresses like precious items. It's surprisingly affordable to just have your own domain!
I won't get into other core benefits of paying for mail (no ads, business model where you're the customer, etc). But...
You can
- have a personal domain and email address for as low as $15/yr (weird tld, small mailbox)
- have something more reasonable (domain+email for $45-65 a year with 20-30GB + various PIM functionality depending on provider and price)
- go all the way up to fully hosted personal cloud solution via something like Microsoft365 ($150/yr)
- self host everything yourself - $7-15/yr for the domain
If you use email heavily, and/or if you value having the option to self-host more things, then it's absolutely worth it.
Personally, I self-host my cloud drive with a freenas box in a very close to default configuration, and use Fastmail for mail+PIM.
If my provider starts sucking, I can switch easily. The more paranoid could use the more expensive protonmail or fully self-host! But what's important is that should I ever choose to switch, it will be a one-and-done thing that probably takes me about an hour of work!
I won't get into other core benefits of paying for mail (no ads, business model where you're the customer, etc). But...
You can
- have a personal domain and email address for as low as $15/yr (weird tld, small mailbox)
- have something more reasonable (domain+email for $45-65 a year with 20-30GB + various PIM functionality depending on provider and price)
- go all the way up to fully hosted personal cloud solution via something like Microsoft365 ($150/yr)
- self host everything yourself - $7-15/yr for the domain
If you use email heavily, and/or if you value having the option to self-host more things, then it's absolutely worth it.
Personally, I self-host my cloud drive with a freenas box in a very close to default configuration, and use Fastmail for mail+PIM.
If my provider starts sucking, I can switch easily. The more paranoid could use the more expensive protonmail or fully self-host! But what's important is that should I ever choose to switch, it will be a one-and-done thing that probably takes me about an hour of work!